JESS Seminar: The Formation of Prosociality: Causal Evidence on the Role of Social Environment

This study presents descriptive and causal evidence on the role of social
environment for the formation of prosociality. In a first step, we show that
socio-economic status (SES) as well as the intensity of mother-child interaction
and mothers’ prosocial attitudes are systematically related to elementary
school children’s prosociality. In a second step, we present evidence on a randomly
assigned variation of the social environment, providing children with a
mentor for the duration of one year. Our data include a two-year follow-up and
reveal a significant and persistent increase in prosociality in the treatment relative
to the control group. Moreover, enriching the social environment bears
the potential to close the observed developmental gap in prosociality between
low and high SES children. Our findings suggest that the program serves as
a substitute for prosocial stimuli in the family environment.